It’s been a jam packed day at the New Media Consortium 2003 summer conference in lovely (humid) Blacksburg Virginia (Hokie-land, Virginia Tech).
The Maricopa Learning eXchange got a large dose of exposure today, and I am thinking many people are going home thinking “Gotta do a Google on RSS”
Yesterday’s workshop, or “blogshop” for faculty at Chandler-Gilbert Community college went very well. It was much to cover (and most was not) in 2 hours, but we got many of these teachers excited, curious, interested in the tools available via a blog. The blog provides all of the information needed to do this as a […]
Some very slick small tools that might be helpful as teaching tools (and other uses). You have to like something with the tagline “your free, preposterously easy instant discussion space” (almost as good as “software that doesn’t suck”)
QuickTopics is a simple platform for web based brief discussions on a single topic (un threaded), that can also have people participate by email. I found it by stumbling through a blog (the url has vanished from my leaky biological memory) where an instructor was using it in a teaching blog as a way for students to respond to weekly topical issues he posed on the blog.
This is the start of our online workshop, or “blogshop” for showing faculty at our colleges a little bit about weblogs, and to get them started using MovableType. It should ba a grand adventure!
Wow, actually I thought the 2003 Double Helix Celebrations site would be a “good dog.”
After all, a historical look at the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA double helix structure, should be a gold mine.
Librarian David Mattison compiled this comprehensive , yet concise (is that possible) collection of resources for Blogs, RSS, and Wikis (gleaned from OLDaily).
One of my major, growling rotweiler pet peeves are the millions, no billions, or web pages that have “click here” links for hypertext. It completely defeats the entire concept of hypertext as an in-context connection to related content.
Well-written hypertext subtly weaves the link by the choice of words used to indicate the link relationship. “Click here” distracts by drawing attention to itselfe rather than the content. And pity the poor person who is using accessibility technology to “read” a web page! It looks really stupid when printed.
“click here” is lame, lazy, and an insult when I view a web page. I know it is a link (unless it is mystery meat navigation).
Thanks to Randy B for noticing that the Onyx RSS parser we use in the RSS to JS demo has been updated. Something about cache-ing issues and line breaks (shrug). Keep up to date. It is a full time job and a half.
Okay, this should do it for a while. D’Arcy Norman suggested adding an output option to allow insertion of item date to the list. While in the code, I also made it possible to have an option on the channel display to list the title only (as well as title and description of channel, or no channel information).
That makes four options to twiddle with.
See the latest demo for details and source code .
A quick update to the PHP script for the RSS to Javascript demo posted here May 7.
For a reminder, this is a strategy for incorporating RSS feeds into ANY web page (HTML, Blackboard, WebCT) via a reference to a single line of JavaScript code.
